imaspeedrunnerfandomcom-20200214-history
User blog:Dessertmonkeyjk/Different kinds of tournaments
Hey, it's me again and I felt like talking about something fun. As the main I'm A Speedrunner tournament series is coming to a close with the supposedly last one being IAS 10, I was pondering on what happens after that. Do such Multi-Single Speedrun based tournaments stop altogether? Will there be new tournaments that break the mold? Will there be something more other than a theme based tournament? There is also this video of Ratchet5 noting such things from one year ago. That's when I started playing around with the idea with how the tournament structure itself was with it always being a Group stage and a Single Elimination/Knockout stage. The original proposal of IAS 9 being a pure Single Elimination tournament was potentially a step in the right direction but was unfortunately at odds with the theme of said tournament. So to follow up, here is are several proposals on what I think would make an interesting tournament in terms of structure. Note that these are just ideas being tossed out here so don't think these are law or something. Team Based Tournament The first concept is a team tournament where instead of competitors going at it alone, they are grouped into several teams and then pitted with another team until one team is the winner. The setup is very similar to how competitors are assigned into groups for the Group stage with the main difference being, obviously, being assigned to teams instead. As a team, competitors will no longer be earned points individually but instead will earn them for the team as a whole. These teams will then be assigned an opposing team to go up against in which they will compete to earn the most points. Here's an example table of two teams going head to head: Competitors would still face each other in one on one matches, mainly due to timezone concerns, with each competitor from one team go up against with another competitor for the opposing team. The team with the most points after these matches have been done would advance to the next round and the opposing team being eliminated. Due to the nature of teams earning points, this pattern repeats for each round until one team is left standing. The winning team's competitors may then be pitted against each other for the Grand Final... because there can be only one champion! Pros and Cons The benefits of having a team based tournaments are having competitors be able to play more matches and potentially stay in the tournament longer even if they mess up. The downside though is that there would be '''alot '''of matches just between each team alone. The other downside is the chance of dropouts within a team which would put them at an unfair disavantage for unable to earn the same maximum possible points as the other team. Another benefit is that rematches can potentially be non-mandontory and the competitors can take the points earned for a draw for their team. There's no downside from as far as I'm aware. The last benefit I see is that there is no need for a Triple Threat match since competitors advancing to the next round are not chosen based on their individual points. However, in the case of a tie between two teams, each team may vote for which competitor will participate in a tie-breaker match. Group Shuffle Tournament The next concept is to have a solely Group-based tournament in which competitors will compete with others in their group to advance... and each new round having a reshuffled group of said competitors. The main gist is that each round is a Group round with no single elimination knockouts until there is only one group left. This takes advantage of the nature of groups in which there are several matches for each competitor with an increased chance of winning versus knockout matches. Here's an example of this in action with first two groups from Round 1 and the reshuffled group in Round 2. The general idea is actually not that complex at all as you can see. Pros and Cons The obvious benefit is that competitors will face multiple competitors in each round opposed to one opponent with a greater chances of advancing. The downside is that all the trappings that come with the Group stage such as Triple Threat Matches. The other benefit is that with groups, not all competitors are required to do their matches before a round deadline. When you think about it, if some competitors don't do their matches then they don't earn points. They don't earn points, they don't advance to the next round. While it is desired that all competitors do their matches, this additional flexibility help keeps things moving. Double Team Tournament The last concept I like to throw out is essentially a hybrid of the previous two that I like to call Double Team. By its namesake, competitors will be group into pairs of two and be pitted against each other in two-on-two matches. While having a Group stage prior to this pairing is possible, there are no points earned in these two-on-two matches. Due to having competitors both being in teams and participating in the same match during this kind of match, the way on how the winner is determined is somewhat different. In this scenario, both competitors of a team must complete their objective before the others do. The objective can be the same for both or be separate but in the end the winner is determined by this rule. This also leads to the idea of tag-team matches where two competitors will be at a predetermined location and one will wait until the other reaches their goal before starting their run. However, this is more difficult to conduct. I'm not leaving an example for this one as I feel it doesn't need one. Pros and Cons The main benefit of doing a Double Team tournament and/or match is that competitors have a somewhat higher chance of winning but at the same time also have a higher chance of losing which means not as many matches. The downside is that these can be more difficult to coordinate as four competitors are participating in a match opposed to two. There is also a greater chance for technical mishaps for each competitor. Conclusion Well, that was somewhat fun to write about. There are other kinds of tournament structures that I could come up with but that would take even longer to write and more for you to read. You didn't skim to the bottom, did you? I hope you didn't because there is no TL;DR version that I can give you here. Anyway, it's getting late so I'm going to spend the rest of the evening mucking about on the internet. See you around and feel free to leave any comments about this blog post. 'night! Category:Blog posts Category:Opinion